July 08, 2014

Top 10 not so Surprising Things You Learn in Religion 101, Part 2: Podcast Edition

This is the second and final part of the conversationTripp Fuller and I had about some issues related to teaching religion courses at state colleges, although, to be fair, it was different and in some ways worse teaching Bible at a private university. The idea here was that students show up in my class woefully unprepared for some stuff that is pretty basic if you study religion, which is to say, someone in their church should have told them these things before they turned 18 and wandered into my class. If you haven't listened to part one or if you're new here, you should know that these conversations aren't anti-religious or specifically anti-Christian. Honestly, I'm probably more irritated at the complete breakdown of education nationwide than at any religion, god, or spiritual person; it's private schools, public schools, and houses of worship all in this disaster together.

We hit on the final six topics here, including the non-maleness of god and how that language shapes ideas, the human element in the Bible and all sacred texts, what it actually means to do what Jesus did, American anti-intellectualism, and finally, whether or not Word of God actually means anything as used by evangelicals and fundamentalists.

Comments

Good stuff, especially the Sermon on the Mount material. Further to the offline conversation on forgetting what it was like to have faith, I find myself more and more surprised lately at how much contempt Christians have for Jesus.